Assignment 11: Reading Gender

I chose for my paper the scene in The Eternal Feminine in which Lupita witnesses the retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. This version of the tale is told by Eve, and Eve is the center of the action. This is no wonder, because while Adam would have been content to live in Paradise forever, Eve is a force of change from the start (in one of the first sentences Adam says to her, he laments that she won’t “follow everyone else’s example”).

The retelling starts out with a conversation between Adam and Eve in which Adam is an example of a highly stereotypical male and his expectations for women. He is extremely patronizing, telling Eve not to talk back or ask questions and suggesting that he is lowering himself by even talking to her. He makes it clear that he expects her to thoughtlessly obey whatever he says, beginning with accepting the name he has chosen for her. Eve questions this repeatedly, and although she eventually relents in accepting the name as “the pseudonym under which I’ll go down in history”, she tells him he will never know her secret, true name by which she will call herself. This establishes Eve as an independent woman who refuses to accept anything just because someone else has told her so—the kind of person, Castellanos seems to be saying, we should all aspire to be.

Adam eventually gives up talking to Eve out of sheer frustration, and leaves her to her own devices. She quickly becomes desperately bored—until the serpent arrives. He explains to her the concept of clothes, and of work, which he says is “the best cure for boredom”. Eve finds all this very intriguing, so the serpent next tempts her with the apple. She is wary at first—but when she does eat it, it seems to be wholly her choice. Rather than a gullible or greedy girl being tricked by the devil, we see a fully competent woman making a conscious declaration of her independence.

When Adams finds out what Eve has done, he’s horrified. He can’t understand why she would want to work when work only makes you ‘tired and sweaty’, and he is shocked that she would go against God’s will by eating the apple. When he eats the apple, it does not appear to be a conscious decision at all; he stupidly eats it all without even noticing what he’s doing because he is too busy trying to comprehend Eve. While Adam immediately falls to his knees to beg for forgiveness, Eve does not regret her decision even when God’s voice tells her that she will now bear her children in pain and die. She is, she says, willing to pay any price for fulfillment. It is interesting that she links having desires and the opportunity to fulfill them to being truly happy; perhaps one of the most basic problems with the way society wants women is be is that they are not supposed to have any real desires.

In this scene, men are portrayed as controlling, and women must be strong, independent and intelligent if they want to have any power over their lives. Certainly there are plenty of men who aren’t half as obnoxious as Adam is—but when taken in relation to society as a whole, and to the Adam and Even fable in particular, Castellnos makes a powerful statement.